Sansar will auto-update to the Friends Release, and the next time you login you’ll be able to find people you know in Sansar and grow your friends list by simply searching for their Avatar IDs. With the Friends release, it’s also easier to make friends in desktop mode – just click on avatars to see their names and send friend requests.

An important point to note here is that it’s the Avatar ID you can search for, this is an important distinction to make because an Avatar ID is unique and may not be the same as an Avatar Name, which isn’t unique.

As an example, a search for “Inara Pey” reveals no result, but a search for Inara’s Avatar ID finds, Inara Pey.

Now if you’re not familiar with Sansar you may be wondering what the big deal is here. The deal is that before this release, in desktop mode for sure, you could hear people and have an idea of where they were, but you didn’t know their names because there were no visual indicators as to who they were, unless they put their own attachment on, as Maxwell Graf did.

This is an important update in terms of Sansar getting social, it should be easier to identify people.

Sansar social involves a lot of voice chat but as it gets easier to identify people I’m sure the use of text chat will grow.

Some people of course are easier to idenfity, if you squint at the photo below you might be able to make out Draxtor Despres on guitar, if that doesn’t work then you will have to take my word for it but Draxtor’s look is an example of what’s to come in terms of identifying people, because fashion is on the agenda.

Get ready, because Sansar is getting a fashion market! Designers will be able to create and sell avatar outfits, and you can expand your virtual wardrobes with looks from the Store. An exciting new technology integration will enable designers to create and sell avatar clothing that moves and folds naturally.

So we’ve had the friends release to help us identify people and soon we’ll get the fashion release where people will be able to be identified by their sense of fashion, which will give us more diverse avatar options.

The Fashion release is on the roadmap, the friends release is here and you can also happily explore Sansar alone where you can visit experiences such as Ortli Villa, an excavated Greek Villa in Crimea and also a place where you can angle the camera to make shoutouts to the best football team the world has ever seen.

The friends release also includes improvements to voice chat, scripting and more, the release notes list the details but Inara Pey’s blog post goes into more detail about the improvements so it’s well worth reading.